We look at the relationship between crop revenues and mortality in the Midwest from 1980 to 2019. For identification, we combine an exposure design with a two-way (i.e., county and year) fixed effects estimator. On average, a decrease in soybean revenue is associated with an increase in mortality: A 10-percent decrease in soybean revenues is associated with a 0.1-percent increase in the age-adjusted all-cause death rate, or about 170 more deaths throughout the Midwest in 2024. Our findings are driven by individuals 65 and older, by women, and they appear mediated by cardiovascular disease and mental health-related issues.

<p>Marc F. Bellemare of University of Minnesota reviews “The New Breadline: Hunger and Hope in the Twenty-First Century” by Jean-Martin Bauer. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Examines the societal causes of and solutions to hunger, highlighting the systems of racism, classism, and sexism that prevail in hunger-prone countries.”</p>

The US Midwest, which is home to over 20 percent of Americans, is heavily dependent on the primary sector of the economy, especially agriculture. We look at the relationship between commodity prices-corn and soybean prices, the dominant commodities in the Midwest-and mortality in a sample of 485 Midwestern counties for the period 1980 to 2016. As outcome variables, we look at crude or age-adjusted all-cause death rates. Because commodity prices are only available at the state or global level, we interact (i) state-level or global commodity prices with (ii) how much of each commodity is grown within each county. Our treatment variable thus captures how, for each commodity, revenues from that commodity within a given county change in response to changes in commodity prices. For identification, we combine the exposure design just described with a two-way, county and year fixed effects design as well as with a number of robust panel data estimators. On average, we find that a decrease in commodity prices is associated with increased mortality across all counties: A 10-percent decrease in either corn or soybean revenues is associated with an increase in the crude death rate of about 0.2 percent, or 0.205 additional deaths per 1,000 persons in a county. This result appears driven by rural counties and by corn price shocks. For robustness, we also estimate specifications in which we instrument revenues from each commodity with measures of drought severity, and we conduct falsification tests. Finally, we show that the relationship between commodity prices and rural mortality appears driven by cardiovascular disease and by suicides.

Some food is lost at the production stage or is wasted by consumers. Policies aimed at avoiding this may have rebound effects through food availability and food prices, thus requiring alternative measures.

In the last half-century, development economics has gone from being a fringe field of economics to being at the very centre of the discipline, and the field’s foremost proponents have been elevated to the highest levels of the discipline. At the same time, development economists have gone from being economists who study situations wherein multiple market failures lead to persistent poverty to being ‘development-and-x’ economists, where x is any of agricultural, demographic, environmental, health, labour, economics etc. Yet few economists, if any, would label themselves development-and-industrial organisation (IO) economists. In this keynote, I first speculate as to why that is. I then explain how the time is ripe to celebrate the marriage of development and IO, and why the study of agricultural value chains provides the ideal inception point for that marriage to be consummated.

In May 2020, in the early days of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, we launched the On-line Agricultural and Resource Economics (OARES) seminar in an effort to maintain a semblance of normalcy for scholars in the field of agricultural and applied economics. The goal of the OARES was to break down the privilege barrier in two ways: (i) by featuring for the most part research by junior, female, or minority scholars, and (ii) by bringing frontier research to those who may not have had access to a regular seminar series prior to the pandemic. Against those goals, we discuss the contribution of the OARES to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in agricultural and applied economics.

This article reviews the literature on contract farming (also known as grower-processor contracts or outgrower schemes) in Asia on the basis of (i) an EconLit search for all peer-reviewed journal articles containing the terms "contract farming," "grower-processor," or "outgrower scheme*" in their title or abstract; and (ii) further selecting only those articles that focus on contract farming in Asia. This procedure yielded 42 articles that fell in one of a handful of categories and were about a handful of Asian economies. Most (i.e., 28 out of 42) studies were about the impact of contract farming on some outcome of interest-usually a proxy for welfare. Likewise, while some economies are overrepresented in the literature (e.g., India, with 17 of 42 studies) on contract farming, well over three quarters of Asian economies do not figure in this literature at all, pointing to serious shortcomings in terms of external validity. On the internal validity front, only two studies in the literature present credible (i.e., causally identified) estimates.

We present an overview of the literature on agri-food value chains in low-and middle-income countries. Starting from farmers' decision of whether to move away from subsistence agriculture to participate in agri-food value chains, we study the process whereby agricultural commodities make their way from the farm-gate to the final consumer, documenting the procurement relationships that arise and the organization of markets at every step of the way. In each step, we take stock of the empirical evidence, critically assess the research so far, and offer a number of directions for future research. We further discuss the challenges and opportunities for global agri-food value chains.

Although many urban areas around the world have grown steadily in recent years, the structural transformation, wherein an economy goes from relying primarily on agriculture and natural resources to relying primarily on manufacturing, has eluded many developing countries. In those countries, contract farming, whereby processors contract out the production of some agricultural commodity to growers, is often seen as a means of spurring the development of an agribusiness sector, and thus launch the structural transformation. As a result, economists and other social scientists have extensively researched contract farming over the last 30 years. We review the findings of the economics literature on contract farming and discuss its implications for development policy and research. In so doing, we highlight the methodological weaknesses that limit much of the literature on contract farming in answering questions of relevance for policy. Despite valiant research effort, many of the core features of contract farming imply substantial challenges for researchers aiming to study the question “Does contract farming improve welfare?” We conclude with a discussion of where we see the literature on contract farming evolving over the next few decades.

Applied econometricians frequently apply the inverse hyperbolic sine (i.e., arcsinh) transformation to a variable because it approximates the natural logarithm of that variable and allows retaining zero-valued observations. We provide derivations of elasticities in common applications of the inverse hyperbolic sine transformation and show empirically that the difference in elasticities driven by ad hoc transformations can be substantial. We conclude by offering practical guidance for applied researchers.

This study has been prepared within the UNU-WIDER project on 'Structural transformation and inclusive growth in Viet Nam'. Abstract: In Vietnam, all lands belong to the state, who assigns usufruct rights to those lands to individuals and households. In 1993, the state gave 20-year usufruct rights to growers of annual crops, and 50-year usufruct rights to growers of perennial crops. In 2013, as the usufruct rights of growers of annual crops were set to expire, the Vietnamese government passed a law-the Land Law of 2013-that extended the usufruct rights of all landowners by 50 years. We exploit this largely unanticipated shock to study the effect of the Land Law of 2013 on the investment behaviour of growers of annual crops. Using a difference-indifferences design, we find that the Land Law of 2013 is associated with a higher likelihood of investment in irrigation technology or soil and water conservation, but not other types of investment. Our results are robust to controlling for endogenous switching from annual to perennial crops, and our data support the parallel trends assumption. Our results also suggest that the long-term effects of the Land Law of 2013 are larger than its short-term effects. Acknowledgements: We thank UNU-WIDER for supporting this research project and for giving us access to the VARHS data. We also thank conference participants at the 2018 Waves of VARHS Data project workshop for useful comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are ours.